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Most bar operators know they're losing product. They just don't know how much — or that it's fixable.
That's the central tension of a recent conversation between Timpl founder Tony Moore and Nick Spohn, Co-Founder of Floteq USA, on the Timpl podcast. It's one of the more honest conversations you'll find about what's actually eating into bar margins — and what operators can do about it today.
The problem everyone accepts and no one should
Nick didn't set out to build a draft monitoring company. He was consulting for a bar owner in Denver who knew his bar should be his top profit center but couldn't get it there. What followed was a simple question: why are operators across the industry accepting 25–30% draft loss as the cost of doing business?
The answer, it turns out, wasn't that the problem was unsolvable. It was that no one had ever delivered real-time, ground-zero data from the tap itself. Not estimates. Not end-of-week inventory counts. Not POS reports. Actual pour data, measured at the source, matched against what the register says happened.
That gap between what your bartender pours and what your POS records is where margin goes to die. Nick calls it the proof-of-pour problem
What the data actually shows
One of the most useful parts of this conversation is how Nick walks through a real customer example. A high-volume Phoenix bar was going through kegs and kegs of Bud Light weekly. Two weeks after installing PourScore™, they ordered one fewer keg and made $450 more on the brand. At only 85% efficiency. Still climbing from 65%.
The owner did the math in real time: four weeks, one brand, $1,800 recovered. And they weren't even done yet.
What makes this land is that Nick doesn't frame it as a technology story. He frames it as a math story — which is exactly how operators think about it. You know how much product you're buying. You know what you're collecting at the register. The question is why those two numbers don't match.
It's usually not theft
This is where the conversation gets genuinely useful for operators. The instinct when variance shows up is to look at your bartenders. Nick's experience is different: 90% of the bars he walks into have beer coolers running at 50°F. Legal max for draft is 42°F. The waste isn't coming from behind the bar — it's coming from environmental conditions no one is watching.
Operators aren't draft technicians. They're not expected to know what CO₂ pressure does to foam ratios at a long draw. What they need is a system that watches those variables and tells them when something is out of range. Simply enough, a prescriptive, easy-to-interpret reason so they can call the right person to fix it without understanding the physics behind it.
That's what PourScore™ does. 96 data points every three seconds, distilled into a single actionable score.
Why this conversation matters right now
Tony pushes Nick on the macro environment — declining alcohol volume among younger consumers, food costs up roughly 40%, labor that used to cost $2.18/hour now starting at $15. Nick's response is worth listening to in full.
His take: declining draft volume isn't necessarily a consumer problem. It might be a product mix problem. Bars that don't have data are still running 20 IPAs on a 24-tap system because that's what they did last year. Meanwhile, what's actually moving has shifted. The operators who close that gap — who know what their customers are ordering, what's sitting still, and what margins look like line by line — are the ones who protect their business when everything else is getting more expensive.
The bar is still the highest-margin center in the house. Draft is still the highest-margin product at the bar. The operators who treat it like the asset it is will be the ones standing when the margin compression everyone is feeling right now stops being manageable.
If you run a bar, manage a multi-location group, or oversee beverage operations at a casino or airport, this is 25 minutes that will change how you think about what's happening in your keg room.
About Timpl
Scaling Insights & Advice: Building in hospitality? Prioritize robust systems early—POS, inventory, HR, and tech like this—before scaling. Changing tires at 100 mph never ends well. Focus on serious operators who value data-driven growth, adaptability across tech stacks, and squeezing every drop of efficiency. This isn't just monitoring taps—it's empowering hospitality businesses to thrive with clarity, confidence, and yes, a whole lot more profit. Timpl is a leading staffing company supplying talent solutions in food and beverage.